Slow food finds saviours

AJUDGE who “lives and breathes food” and a photographer who likes to specialise in food and wine pictures have stepped up to stop Slow Food Hobart from not only going off the boil but down the plughole.

Last November, I wrote that the Hobart branch, or convivium, of the international movement dedicated to good, clean, fair food for everyone, was in danger of coming to a stop.

Leader Jo Cook and secretary Pamela Wilkinson were resigning and nobody else put their hand up at that meeting.

Slow Food took a threemonth breather to see if people could be found to take the roles.

At a meeting last Tuesday, Stephen Estcourt became leader and Chris Crerar secretary.

They are both new members of Slow Food, but when I interviewed Stephen about his impending role he said it was a movement that aligned with the way he and his wife Mary lived their lives.

In their Hobart suburban home they “have chooks, we have bees, we grow our own vegies, we grow herbs. I make my own bread and we make our sauces and chutneys”.

When he is not at work in the Supreme Court or in the garden, Stephen said he is reading cookbooks or watching SBS Food.

And some chicken husbandry tips for very hot days: feed them chopped frozen cucumber, iceberg lettuce and add ice to their water.

A food blogger (Reminiscences of a Food Tragic) from before Instagram and when Twitter was an infant, Stephen, with Mary, organised two World Parties to celebrate diversity through food, music and dance.

They were held in 2010 and 2012, but when Stephen became a judge, pressing people for sponsorship was not appropriate (nor were doublefine Fridays he joked) and the World Parties stopped.

Slow Food sits more comfortably with his job.

“I don’t see saving the world’s biodiversity, both natural and cultural, is in any way political,” he said.

Climate change is the big issue for Slow Food, and agriculture is both a contributor to and a victim of the climate crises. Slow Food international says agriculture is responsible for 21 per cent of global emissions (energy emits more at 37 per cent and transport less at 14 per cent). The main source is methane produced by intensive livestock farms (40 per cent), then synthetic fertilisers (13 per cent).

Slow Food document Food for Change says: “But agriculture, particularly smallscale farming, is also the first victim of climate change, as farmers have to deal with devastating droughts interrupted by flash floods, and make longer and longer journeys to find water for their animals.

Stephen believes: “It’s not so much whether you are a vegetarian or a meat-eater, it’s destructive farming that’s the problem.”

He quotes Andrea Burgener writing in Business Day, South Africa, last August: “Livestock farming on grasslands that require almost no external inputs and regenerates land shouldn’t even be spoken of in the same breath as the beef originating from graindependent beef farming ...”

“Tasmania has a real role to play, because we are going to be last to be affected significantly by global warming,” said Stephen.

“We need to be looking at not what we produce but how we produce it.”

Stephen is also interested in fostering in Tasmania the Slow Food Cooks Alliance, which has more than 1100 members who support small producers, and who are asked to add the name of the producers to their menus. Chris Crerar is a former

Mercury photographer, who now freelances.

His photography includes the food and location shots for Sally Wise’s A Year on the Farm.

He says his surname is Scottish Gaelic for miller’s assistant.